Cold Spring, N.Y. In order to get people thinking rightly about economists, Fritz Schumacher used to tell the story of an architect, a priest, and an economist talking about which one had the oldest profession. The architect argued that his was the oldest because God was acting as an architect when he fashioned the Garden of Eden. No, said the priest, his was the oldest because before that God created heaven and earth, and the contemplation of that was the business of priests. Yes, said the economist, God created heaven and earth, but out of chaos—and who do you think created that?

Schumacher was one to know the terrible mess that economists created when they fashioned modern industrial capitalism and gave themselves full employment, for he was for twenty years the chief economist of the British National Coal Board. He would not be surprised at the chaos of the current global meltdown and the inability of anyone to understand it enough to ameliorate its disaster, though he might be a little taken aback by the complexity and extent of it all. And he would probably be somewhat bemused by the inability of anyone in the seats of power to think beyond the limits of conventional growth-is-the-answer economics.

Schumacher also knew what the alternative to chaos economics was, and he formulated it, after a trip to Burma in the 1960’s, as “Buddhist Economics,” based on the Buddha’s “noble eight-fold path”—including right livelihood, right understanding, right action, right effort, and right purpose. He felt deeply that there could be no proper, just, and meaningful economic life without the spiritual and ecological values of a religion like Buddhism; “economics without Buddhism,” he once said, “is like sex without love.”

He presented his thoughts in the beautiful essay “Buddhist Economics” in his 1973 best-seller, Small Is Beautiful. But he never did work it out as an eight-fold path as the Buddha had done, so I have undertaken to draw one out from the whole of Schumacher’s work (Guide for the Perplexed, 1977, GoodWork, 1979, and material at the Schumacher Library in Great Barrington, MA), adding in some insights from the Buddhist corpus and a few perspectives from the bioregional canon. It may not do full justice to Schumacher’s grand vision (or to Buddha’s, for that matter), but at a time when it is more vital than ever to put forth and try to establish a “third-way” economics, this suggests the direction.

All production of goods and services would be based on a reverence for life, a biocentric world view that takes in animals, birds, fishes, insects, plants, trees (especially important to Buddha), all the living ecosystems and the air and water they depend on—in short the living earth, Gaea herself.

All systems have limits and they must be learned and adhered to in every economic act. Overuse of a resource or species would be seen as a criminal act of violence, overproduction of a resource or a species (i.e., humans) would be seen as an immoral act of avarice, not to mention stupidity.

The primary unit of economic life would be the community, within a self-regarding bioregion striving to fulfill all its needs; political and economic decisions would be taken at these levels.

Consumption would be limited, not an end in itself but merely a means to human well-being, asking only that which is enough to satisfy vital human needs; the goal of economic life is not the multiplication of wants but the satisfaction of needs.

Everything produced and the means of its production would embody the four cardinal (and, not incidentally, alternative technology) principles of smaller, simpler, cheaper, safer—that is to say, technology on a human scale.

The only jobs would be those that enhance the worker, contribute to the immediate community, and produce nothing but needed goods—without unneeded bads.

All people who wish to do so would work, for it is the function of work to nourish and develop the individual soul, aiming at fulfilling the highest nature of the human character; but those who wish only to contemplate and compose would be given equal merit.

All economic decisions would be made in accordance with the Buddhist principle, “Cease to do evil, try to do good,” and the definition of “good” would be that which preserves and enhances the integrity, stability, diversity, continuity, and beauty of living species and systems; that which does the contrary is evil.

There it is, the eight-fold path.

Will it possibly come about, on this earth, in this age? I would not bet on it. But it is necessary to contemplate the ingredients of such a change, and understand their true meaning, because as the present system collapses and the chaos unfolds around more and more of us, it will be necessary for people everywhere to shelter themselves as best they can and contrive such systems as they can to create an economy that will permit the continuation of the human species rather than its elimination. The eight-fold path could be their guide.

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Cold Spring, NY–It’s getting worse and worse, and the wizards don’t have a clue. They don’t even know the economy is broken-and can’t be fixed. That’s why they keep doing more of the same with the same old solutions and same old people.

Nothing could be more obvious, and I think most sentient people in the land know this in their hearts. And nothing could be more obvious than the need to overhaul that economy entirely-which is indeed the opportunity we have now.

I don’t mean we have to scrap the capitalist system entirely, but we do have to reign it in. We have to fit it in to the limits of the real world. We have to understand that economics is a subsystem of the overall ecosystem. We have to realize that continuing to base it on the concepts of growth and consumption–and encouraging, “stimulating,” more of that–will lead to the collapse not only of the global economy but probably the industrial civilization it serves.

Isn’t it obvious that the Keynesian idea of growth at all costs, particularly growth fostered by large governments that can print money, has failed? Isn’t it clear that we can’t keep on throwing money at this failed economy and that something quite different is needed? The U.S. economy has been devoted exclusively to the idea of perpetual growth since the end of World War II, and it has allowed any number of evils-environmental destruction, greenhouse gases, pollution, resource depletion, military expansion, government inefficiency and corruption, corporate political domination, unregulated financial institutions, immense inequality, a perpetual underclass, the decay of public education, and that’s just for starters-in its pursuit. Isn’t it obvious that it doesn’t work and that the current Great Recession is the proof of that?

Let us posit that the three greatest perils we face are resource depletion (particularly oil, but don’t forget fish and fresh water, for example), global warming and the alteration of habitats and species, and an excessive human impact on the planet at all levels. They are all the result of unchecked economic growth, and on a planetary scale. If we continue business as usual we will surely meet up with their disastrous consequences.

The alternative? Nothing complicated: a non-growth ecnonomy. A human-scale economy. A steady-state economy.

The idea of a steady-state economy was spelled out by John Stuart Mill in the middle of the 19^th century, and has been taken up and amplified by a whole host of thinkers in recent times, including Herman Daly, Kenneth Boulding, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Leopold Kohr, Hazel Henderson, Howard Odum-oh, and myself (Human Scale, 1980). There is today an organization called the Center for the Advancement of a Steady-State Economy, and in the UK a Sustainable Development Commission has recently issued a report called “Prosperity Without Growth.”

But what steady-state scholars have traditionally failed to emphasize, and what I have always held to be crucial, is scale. They have tended to picture such an economy, naturally but erroneously, on the scale of the nation-state, without realizing that it is the size and nature of the state in the first place that tends to foster growth and would be hard-pressed to do otherwise.

A true steady-state economy can operate only at a scale where the people involved understand they are living within, and dependent upon, a finite ecosystem, and make their economic decisions in the mutual self-interest of humans and fellow creatures in that system. The limits and possibilities of the bioregion they live in will constrain all economic activity, which would be primarily to ensure the continued existence of the bioregion at a harmonious and productive level and would preclude destruction or pollution of the sources of economic life.

And ultimately it would depend on community. That is, the level of a few thousand people-maybe five thousand or ten, maybe as many as twenty or thirty-who are able to deliberate and decide how their economy best fits into their ecosystem. They would grow their own food, make their own necessities, generate their own energy, create their own culture, to the maximum extent of human well-being and pleasure within the constraints of the other systems and species they live with.

That would be the kind of economy that this nation ought to be thinking about and working toward-not more, and more, of the same. Because if we don’t start doing that now, and in a serious and dedicated way, we’re going to have to start doing it when this current economy collapses-as surely it will if it goes on printing money to sustain a flawed and failing growth economy.

I don’t really think that the present political system will really come to its senses in time and turn the country in the direction I have suggested. It’s just that I can’t see how it can go on doing what it is doing without understanding that it is ultimately destroying the very world it lives in. And that I see this crisis as so blatant an indictment of corporate globalism that I feel it ought, as any good crisis does, to give us the opportunity for true and meaningful change.

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Cold Spring, NY. Leopold Kohr, the author of the great classic, The Breakdown of  Nations, once said that his approach to the world–in favor of smaller nations, smaller institutions, smaller associations–was due to his having been born in a small village, Obendorf, just outside of Salzburg,  Austria. When your childhood is spent within limits, he used to say, where you get to know a good number of people well and also a lot of people no closer than to say “hello” to, you have some approximate experience of how humans lived for many eons before anyone ever thought of cities.

There is much murkiness here, but the general anthropological opinion is that the original African Homo sapiens settlements consisted of bands of between 25 and 50 people, within tribes that might have been between 500 and 1,000, and this is how we lived for at least 250,000 years.  It is, as they now say, encoded in our genes.  “the social organization based on the hunter-gatherer ways of life,” as the eminent microbiologist Rene Dubos has said, “lasted so long–several hundred thousand years–that it has certainly left an indelible stamp on human behavior…. The genetic determinants of behavior, and especially of social relationships, have thus evolved in small groups during several thousand generations.”

And so it is that I was born in a village in upstate New York and spent most of my first twenty years there, and that has made an imprint on me–on my philosophy, social attitudes, certainly on my politics–that has lasted powerfully for the rest of my life–even though I spent thirty years of it in its antitheses, Manhattan.  I don’t know what the population of Cayuga Heights–overlooking Cayuga Lake, as you might expect–was in the 1940s, but I seem to remember it as being something just over a thousand.

The local elementary school was small and the classes no bigger than twenty, if  memory serves.  I can remember when it was proposed that the school shrink from eight grades to six, with students to be bussed down to a junior high school grades seven to nine, and I can remember facing what I thought was a large crowd in the school basement when I was one of two students allowed to speak up against the change.  I lost then, and not for the last time in a worthy cause, but something in my genes flatly resisted the idea of leaving a human-scale school for the vagaries of education down in the city of Ithaca.  All right, not a big city–I guess about 20,000 then–but it seemed bug enough to me.

Not only was the community small but it had something it called the Community Corners as its economic hub, and that was no more than a grocery store, dry cleaners, book store, and maybe a small variety store.  I worked in the grocery in the summers for three years, and my impression is that the Corners functioned less as an economic  hub–it couldn’t have been doing that much business, and larger, fancier stores were available a few miles away in downtown Ithaca–than a social one. People would gather and talk  in knots, in the parking lots, on the sidewalk, at the meat counter in the back, and so many people used to come through the checkout line at my cash register on Sundays with only one or two items that I used to wonder whether they had come out of necessity or just to see other people after church.

The fact that my end of Cayuga Heights blended in with some farms as it went northward, not all of them working but still with open fields where birds sang and fireflies danced in droves, also had some effect on me growing up.  I used to skate and play hockey on the pond at one place where the old farmer never even seemed to venture outside in the winter, and I would ride my bike down dirt roads that seemed to lead nowhere past farmhouses and barns that varied from spanking neat to decrepit.  Somehow I had the sense that I was connected to people who knew the land, knew how to grow things (besides a Victory Garden like my father had), had some solidity and longevity in place (unlike my family, new to the village).

So I want to argue that in some sense it was inevitable that when I began to formulate a politics, it had to be in opposition to the big, the oppressive, the autocratic, the expansive, the all-embracing, in favor of the communitarian, the local, the democratic, the human scale.  I guess it was as a first taste of this that I led a demonstration of some 3,000 students at Cornell University in 1958 against an authoritarian university that declared it was acting in loco parentis (when one of the reasons people liked college is that they escaped their parents), decided to forbid “petting and intercourse” by undergraduates, and diminished student self-government.  And not long after that I was led to Murray Bookchin and his arguments for anarcho-communalism, which were in some ways (though I didn’t think of it at the time) a kind of working-out on a grander scale the experience I had had subliminally as a kind growing up in Cayuga Heights.

After that, a career writing about decentralism, participatory democracy, human scale, small-is-beautiful, the corruption of centralized American government, the evils of discovery and conquest, the tyranny of the Industrial Revolution, and now most recently secession and self-determination may be no more than something based on “the genetic determinants of behavior” growing up village.

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Mt. Pleasant, SC–As little as I wished to make my first post for FPR an overtly political essay on contemporary affairs–I had meant to rumination growing up in a small village attendant upon farmlands in upstate New York–I was compelled by the events of the last few weeks to say a few words on the new phenomenon of serious discussion of secession. And secession is, anyway, a core principle of decentralism and self-determination, having to do with the distribution of power, approximate self-government, and the proper scale of human endeavors that I would take to be inherent in the Front Porch Republic.

It is heartening that at last, thanks to a few off-the-cuff remarks by Texas governor Rick Perry on “tea-party” day, people are starting to talk about secession in these not-very-United States, and for the most part taking the concept seriously. (“Secession Talk,” as the New York Times put it, “Stirs Furor.”) It’s the first time it has been a genuine subject in American public discourse, says Emory University secession scholar Donald Livingston, since the war of Southern Independence was settled in 1865.

So it’s no surprise that a lot of people have completely misunderstood it, and that the nerve in their knees often impels them to declare it illegal and unconstitutional. Robert Schlesinger, a columnist for U.S. News, is typical: under a headline “Texas Can’t Secede,” he wrote that “one third of the voters think the state has the legal right to secede from the Union.” Then, so sure of his errant position he could get cutsey, he added, “Ummm, no,” and went on to scold them for being so ignorant.

But the plain truth is that Texas has that right, and so do the other 49 states.

In fact, there has never been a real question about the legitimacy of secession. It was the principle that led the 13 colonies to fight to get out from under the British crown in the war of 1776. It was the principle implicit in the 13 states ratifying the Constitution in 1789, made explicit in the ratifying documents of New York, Virginia, and Rhode Island. It was the option understood to be available to all states from that time until 1861, and considered by New England states at the Hartford Convention of 1814. No one put forth a compelling argument that secession was unconstitutional, and the fact that the US Congress in 1861 debated and failed to pass a law against it proves that it was not illegal even in that year.

Lincoln put forth various, and often greatly varying, arguments against secession, but, as Livingston says, relying on their refutation by pro-Unionist philosopher Christopher Wellman (A Theory of Secession, 2005), “Lincoln’s arguments are preposterous.” He was not relying on reason and history and philosophical argument, no more than his party did, but on instinct and temperament, with pride and egotism (“Not on my watch”) mixed in.

(In fact, so far as reason has to do with it, Lincoln had previously argued that “any people anywhere… have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and to form one that suits them better,” and in his First Inaugural held that “if a majority deprives a minority of a clearly written constitutional right,” that would justify revolution.)

Of course it is true that the particular secession of 1861-65 did not succeed–but that didn’t make it illegal or even unwise. It made it a failure, that’s all. The victory by a superior military might is not the same thing as the creation of a superior constitutional right. In fact it dealt only with the question of whether secession would work that one time, decisively decided in the negative by an autocratic, unconstitutional usurpation of power and the waging of a deadly war that defied all civilized standards of warfare to date.

Amid all the talk today, it will be necessary for those who know history and the Constitution to refute those who throw up the rhetoric of “illegal” and “unconstitutional” and the like so that we can get on to an examination of its particular merits.

For example, that New York Times story on “Secessionist Talk” declared that there has been “no serious argument since the Civil War [sic]on behalf of a legal basis for a state’s secession.” Completely wrong. In 1998 David Gordon brought together ten eminent scholars to offer as serious, not to mention academic, a set of arguments for secession (Secession, State,and Liberty) as there could be. Some of the contributors to that volume, notably Livingston, Clyde Wilson, and Thomas di Lorenzo, have subsequently written any number of articles laying out the legitimacy and legality of secession from the Union. The Wellman book also is an extremely careful setting out of not only legal bases but moral and political supports for that action.

I’m not saying that secession is necessarily the immediate answer to the roiling problems of this country for everyone everywhere. But it is something that should rightly be considered, thoughtfully and thoroughly, by many of the states and regions that see themselves as illegitimately being pushed around and dictated to and mishandled by a central government that has, over the last few decades, proven itself to be undemocratic, unresponsive, corrupt, inept, and unduly intrusive, at times unlawful and unconstitutional, and essentially unable to govern at the geographic and populational scale to which we have grown.

Looked at it that way, it’s about the only thing that makes sense.

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